Newsonomics: Here Are 20 Epiphanies For The News Business Of The 2020s

It is the best of times for The New York Times — and likely the worst of times for all the local newspapers with Times (or Gazette or Sun or Telegram or Journal) in their nameplates across the land. When I spoke at state newspaper conferences five or ten years ago, people would say: “It’ll... ...

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Newsonomics: Amid Screaming Alarms, Consolidation Mania Turns Feverish

Alden’s going to snatch Gannett! No, Gannett’s going to turn the tables and buy Alden’s Digital First Media! But wait, Gannett will reject Alden — is that a real offer? — and turn its attention to merging with Tribune! No, Tribune — having dispatched its CEO Justin Dearborn to clear the way for ...

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9 Midsummer, 2017 News Lessons: NYT Subs, Sinclair’s Ascent, DFM’s Long Good-bye, New Antitrust Public Interest Thinking, WSJ Resurgence?

This hardly seems like a beachy, devil-may-care summer. Among fears of North Korean missiles, new Russian menace, and a highly unpredictable Administration, we are a nervous people. For the news media, it’s been a year of two tales. Never has the press been so pilloried, relentlessly, ...

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The Newsonomics of Murdoch, Time Warner, the $80B Offer and the New Quest for Big, Big, Big

Follow Newsonomics on Twitter @kdoctor First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab   Rupert Murdoch’s announced $80B pursuit of Time Warner this morning seemed like a bolt out of the blue to many. But the strong winds of consolidation make this kind of foray — and the others ...

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The Newsonomics of Spotified News Subscriptions

RELATED ARTICLE The newsonomics of Comcast’s deal and our digital wallets First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab Can you make digital subscriptions sing? In a first-of-its-kind partnership with streaming music leader Spotify, The Times of London has brought a whole new meaning ...

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The Newsonomics of the Shopping of Press+ and The Coming of Paywalls 2.0

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab   In April 2009, when Journalism Online began operations, its business — providing the backend for websites offering different kinds of paywalls — was largely derided. Two years later, when the company — having largely assumed the ...

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The Newsonomics of Jeff Bezos’ (and Warren Buffett’s) “Runway”

What do all of these newspaper buyers have in common? They don’t have to look back at loss and what used to be. They’ve bought strong brands with tens or hundreds of thousands of reader/customer relationships and thousands of advertising relationships. Those are the kinds of assets that a ...

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Nine Questions: Savior Bezos, Chronicle Debacle, Patch Undone, the Long Beach Lunge & More

Is reader revenue one of the answers to the next stage of hyperlocal? The halving of Patch ("The newsonomics of Patch's unraveling", today at the Nieman Journalism Lab) is just another curve on the long road to marry local news and digital. Like Backfence and many newspaper forays, it has found ...

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The Newsonomics of Jeff Bezos Buying the Washington Post

First published at Nieman Journalism Lab It is a thunderbolt. If not tossed down from Mt. Olympus, it is thrown from Mt. Amazon, not far from Washington’s beatific Olympic Mountains. Jeff Bezos’s surprise buying of the Washington Post whipsaws media, and a media-watching world, intrigued by Red ...

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The Newsonomics of Shop ‘Til You Hop

What’s most intriguing, I believe, is that the way they each, differently, is trying to change real-world relationships. It is the disintermediators and remediators — the Googles, Yahoos, Amazons, and Microsofts — that have gotten between publishers, manufacturers, retailers, and their ...

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